Just realized our Facebook ad manager was running the same creative for 8 months straight

I pulled the performance report for a client in Phoenix last week and the click-through rate dropped 40% after month 3, so now I'm scheduling a creative audit every quarter has anyone else caught a stale campaign like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

logan2361mo ago

Actually caught one running for 11 months straight for a local plumber client - same exact photo of a smiling guy with a wrench, same headline, same call to action. @grantp28 that Asana schedule is smart but I'd also add tracking how many times an individual user sees the creative before you swap it. Facebook's frequency metric hides that some people see it 20 times while others see it once. I pulled a report where our highest lifetime value customers had seen the ad 35+ times before converting, so instead of swapping everything at 60 days I started doing soft rotates - keep the high performers for new audiences, swap them for retargeting groups. It's a pain to set up but stops that blind autopilot without killing ads that still work.

the_mary1mo agoTop Commenter

So frustrating when those ads just run on autopilot like that.

grantp281mo ago

Was the account just running on total autopilot with no oversight? I ran into that last year with a B2B client where the ads manager had set it and forgotten it entirely. What worked for me was building a simple rotation schedule into Asana with mandatory creative swaps every 60 days, no exceptions. @the_mary nailed it about autopilot being the real issue here. I also started pulling the ad relevance diagnostics every two weeks and flagging any copy that was older than 90 days for immediate review. It's honestly wild how fast people mentally tune out an ad, even if the metrics look fine on the surface.